Letter
Christopher Prendergast
Christopher Prendergast is a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.
Letter
Lethal Appropriation
20 October 2005
Thomas Jones’s resurrection of the long-forgotten 1864 pamphlet by Maurice Joly, Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, is timely in ways even more apropos than he suggests (LRB, 20 October). The Dialogue was ostensibly a satire on Louis-Napoleon’s 1851 coup d’état (shortly after its publication Joly was arrested by Louis-Napoleon’s police), but at a deeper level it was concerned...
Letter
Vote Prendergast
17 March 2005
Gerard McBurney is right to point out that my father couldn’t have fallen on the non-existent escalator at Tufnell Park (Letters, 31 March). The name of the tube station was mistakenly inserted by the LRB’s editors; the episode in fact occurred at St John’s Wood.
Letter
Rimbaud’s Brahmas
9 October 2003
It’s a pity that Jeremy Harding (LRB, 9 October) did not pick up on Mark Treharne’s superlative 1998 translations of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and Saison en enfer. Treharne would have proved useful, too, on a point of textual scholarship raised by Harding. In respect of the prose poem ‘Villes 1’, he reports that André Guyaux (who is currently revising the Pléiade Rimbaud) has ‘announced...
Letter
On War and Intervention
20 February 2003
Conor Gearty and David Ramsbotham refer to ‘pre-emptive war’ in their respective accounts of the Iraq crisis. The matter is complicated however by the reference to ‘preventive’ war in a text by Michael Quinlan quoted by Gearty. Is there some confusion here between two distinct doctrines? As I have been given to understand it, the justification of ‘pre-emptive war’ rests on the belief, beyond...
Pieces about Christopher Prendergast in the LRB
All the world’s a spy novel: What Didn’t Happen
Michael Wood, 30 July 2020
Why is luck good or bad, an incentive to gambling, while chance seems weirdly neutral? And what was it like in the old days when Fortune played a larger role in ordinary consciousness, taking up quite...
The Thing: Versions of Proust
Michael Wood, 6 January 2005
What was it Proust said about paradise? That all paradises are lost paradises? That the only true paradise is a lost paradise? That it isn’t paradise until it’s lost? That paradise is...
Unreal City
Michael Wood, 7 October 1993
Baudelaire’s city is swarming with people and full of dreams, a place of daylight ghosts. Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves Où le spectre, en plein jour,...
I am a Cretan
Patrick Parrinder, 21 April 1988
The story goes that, on the day when William Empson moved into Magdalene College, Cambridge, to take up a fellowship, his suitcases (as was the custom in those days) were unpacked by one of the...
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